


i fight the world, i fight you, i fight myself

by agent_carter



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 11:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18872707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_carter/pseuds/agent_carter
Summary: One, two, three months go by, and then they wake him up.





	1. my heart is beating like it’s lonely (like there’s nothing else inside of me)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Pray For Me" by Kendrick Lamar and The Weeknd

“My heart is beating like it’s lonely, like there’s nothing else inside of me.”

 **Junot Díaz,** **_This Is How You Lose Her_ **

* * *

 

One, two, three months go by, and then they wake him up.

 

>>

 

They wake him up and it's still awful, but a different awful than HYDRA.

 

In Zola's lab he woke up violent, thrashing, confused. He had been known to shatter glass and break machinery, snap limbs and even once, bitten off a soldier's ear. So they would drown him in blaring alarms and a lake of epileptic light, dozens of hands pulling and groping and grabbing, the sensory overload finally driving him to his knees, palms pressed tight over his ears, unable to hear himself scream.

 

In T'Challa's lab, the staff dimmed the lights and shrouded the machines, woke him up by degrees in the dark and quiet. He woke gentler, but still not gently, consciousness thawing his mind like a blowtorch held to an ice cube. Then confusion took him captive, scraps of memory patching together. His body twitched and spasmed, everything trying to regain sensation at once. The first frantic opening of his eyes, the instant collapse of his lungs.

 

And the cold. Always, the cold.

 

>>

 

“It could be different,” T’Challa says the second time, the third, the fifteenth.

 

“It could be different,” T'Challa says, when Bucky is huddled in the darkest corner of the lab, the new prosthetic thrown across the room. “If you let it."

 

He doesn’t let it.

 

He goes back into cryo, lets them hit defrost every month and takes the pain, and the confusion, and the inexplicable kindness from T’Challa’s staff. From T’Challa.

 

>>

 

He agreed to spend one day of every month awake, and he spends most of that day reading, searching for himself in history books.

 

1943, Khatyn village. 5,000 homes burned, over 1,500 dead.  

He makes himself read it.

 

1963, the Kennedy assassination. Conspiracies about missing gunmen, Soviet involvement.

He makes himself read it.

 

1990, the January Massacre. 147 dead, 800 more injured.

He makes himself read it.  
  
>>

 

“Does it help you? To put yourself through this?” T’Challa asks, when he sees the pile of books.

 

Bucky ignores him.

 

>>  
  
Some memories are surprisingly painless—he remembers the moon landing and Sputnik and the Moscow Olympics, thinks he met Freddie Mercury in a bar once and is pretty sure the Cuban Missile Crisis was at least half his fault.

 

But there are other memories too.

 

Ones that howl inside him.

 

Obliterated landscapes that might have been Chechnya but could have been Afghanistan, mutilated bodies that might have been marks but were probably civilians, Howard and Maria Stark were two names among hundreds and he can’t remember if his assignment was to stop Chernobyl or ensure it.

 

Either way, he doesn’t sleep.

 

>>

 

“Until next time,” T’Challa says, pressing his hand against the glass.

 

Bucky closes his eyes as the ice blasts up around him, as his body starts to go numb, as the darkness mercifully takes him.

 

>>

 

An ugly truth: cryostasis is a relief.

 

>>

 

The next time they wake him up, they’re two months late.

 

He doesn’t notice until Shuri’s showing him his vitals on a holoscreen.

 

Of everyone here, she’s his favorite. She reminds him of Peggy, reminds him of Steve, reminds him of anyone who’s ever been scorned, then choked that scorn with both hands.

 

“You forget about me?” He jokes, pointing at the timestamp, but his stomach is already sinking, because he knows she didn’t forget, knows she doesn’t make mistakes, knows that there’s something she’s not telling him.

 

So she tells him.

 

About Erik. About T’Challa. About the coffin made of snow.

 

>>

 

“I could have helped.” Bucky says angrily.

 

They’re walking down a long glass corridor, part of the labyrinthine network suspended around the lab.

 

“You could _not_ have helped.” T’Challa says firmly.

 

Bucky opens his mouth to retort. “James,” T’Challa sighs, and Bucky stops cold. Something about his name still freezes him in a way that cryo never could.

 

The king holds his gaze. “There was nothing you could have done.”  

 

“I could have protected you.” Bucky argues, then, bitterly, before he could help it, “That's what I’m _for_.”

 

T’Challa blinks, then carefully touches Bucky’s shoulder, the one Shuri had made for him, emblazoned with Steve’s star.

 

“A king protects his people,” he says quietly. “That’s what _I’m_ for.”

Bucky clenches his teeth, turns away, looks out into into the lake of darkness, shot through with impossible light.

 

“I’m not going back in.” He says, as the distant train speeds past. “After all you’ve done for me—if something happens again and I’m _asleep_ —” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t live with myself.”   

 

“If that is your wish,” T’Challa says, and though his voice is neutral, Bucky thinks he might sound proud.

 

>>

 

He tries his best, but within days, Bucky hates being awake.

  
Time feels strange and thick and syrupy. There seem to be too many minutes in the day, too many days in the week. He can barely conceive the thought of a _year_ , trapped inside his own head, buried alive in memories.

 

Some days he just lays in bed for hours, staring at his limbs and willing them to move, willing his body will not betray him. Yet betray him it did.

 

He longs for cryo, and it sickens him.

 

He wishes he could sleep, but more than that, he wishes he could _rest_.

 

>>

 

Steve calls every few weeks, in between spats with SHIELD agents or HYDRA lackeys or Stark’s people. He always sounds strained, he always sounds _exhausted._

 

He always sounds impossibly grateful to hear Bucky’s voice.

 

And _that_ shouldn’t be the thing that keeps him up at night, but it is.

 

>>

 

Sometimes, he watches the trains.

 

Shuri had explained them to him. Vibranium and magnets. Gravity and electricity. He doesn’t really understand, doesn’t really try, just likes to sit and watch them from a window until he gets too tired to think.

 

The blue light makes him feel like he’s underwater, like he’s submerged, like he’s drifting along the bottom of the sea, almost peaceful, almost quiet, almost deaf to his own memory— _Grab my hand_ , says someone, _Freight car,_ says someone.

 

“Can’t sleep?”

 

Bucky’s eyes snap open.

 

T’Challa was walking towards him, the blue light racing over his skin.

 

The king drops down beside him. There’s an insomniac’s sheen over his eyes and a hard twist to his mouth, it’s probably three in the morning, and Bucky almost wants to ask what drove the king from his bed, what brought him here at this hour, what made him look so _sad_ —

 

But he’s not the kind of person who asks anyone anything anymore.

  
>>

 

He lies to the doctors about being able to sleep, because he doesn’t want to be medicated.

 

So it was really only a matter of time before he started sleepwalking.

 

When they find him, his eyes are open and blank, his medbay bed knocked over, the sheets strewn across the floor.

 

_“Sergeant Barnes?”_

 

He doesn’t respond. The blood is pounding in his ears.

 

_“Sergeant Barnes.”_

 

His fingernails dig into his palms.

 

 _“James,”_ the voice says, but Bucky can’t hear it, they’re coming for him, his enemies in the shadows, they’re waiting, they’re hungry—the nameless, the butchered. They are coming for him, out of the dark.  

 

T’Challa puts his hand out, touches his shoulder, and then Bucky is on him, knocking him flat, metal hand crushing his windpipe, watching the light drain out of his eyes, feeling the power, the destruction, the glorious precipice of death—

 

He wakes up.

 

>>

 

It took five guards to pull him off T’Challa, he learns later.

 

>>

 

Shuri offers to sedate him.

 

He lets her.

 

>>

 

More than anything he wants to refuse—terrified of being zombified, liquified, vulnerable.

 

But he lets her do it, because she is not Arnim Zola, because she outlines the science and explains the medicine and because her hands are so, so gentle. He lets her do it, even though the needles make his teeth hurt and the tranquilizers fill his head with smog. He lets her do it, because right now, the only thing worse than feeling awake, is feeling alive.

 

>>

 

_James,_

 

_I know we didn’t get a chance to know each other that well, but I know that you’re going through a kind of pain that no one will ever fully understand. Guys like us tend to bottle up and shoulder through, but trust me, talking helps. It doesn’t have to be me, but it should be someone. It’s never weak to know when you’re not strong._

_Sam_

 

>>

  
His first reaction to the message had been a dull irritation. Then a rising resentment. Then a dark, futile anger.

 

His metal hand clenched down so hard it snapped the screen in half, glass splinters glancing off the synthetic skin in an utterly unsatisfying way. So he breaks that next, tearing the limb off at the shoulder and flinging it across the room.

 

It doesn’t help. He feels strange, numb, his body on wrong, his mind somehow too close and too far away at the same time. The only real thing in the world was this anger, like a pool of lava in his belly, proof of his pain, proof of his simple human ugliness.

 

 _You don’t know me,_ he wants to say, wants to _scream_ , because Sam doesn’t know him, not at all.

 

 _But then again,_ he thinks, _I don’t know myself either._

 

His heartbeat pounds in his ears, then slows. He puts his face in his hand.

 

He feels it stop. Feels the fury drain out of him. Feels the molten rage harden into an endless, granite sadness.

 

>>

 

“This shouldn’t have happened to you,” Shuri says, when she finds him in her lab, crouched in a corner, the broken tablet in his hand, the metal arm thrown against the wall.

  
“This shouldn’t have happened to you,” she repeats, and puts her arms around him.

 

>>

 

When he gets to the window overlooking the train tracks, T’Challa is already there.

 

They stand beside each other, not speaking.

 

“I can never,” Bucky starts, clears his throat. “Apologize for what I did.”

 

T’Challa looks at him. “Yes, you can.” He says, and it’s simple, and honest, and completely devastating.

 

>>

 

Even though every single part of him rails against it, Bucky takes Sam’s advice.

 

Azari, his therapist, is a soft-spoken, sharp-eyed woman. She doesn’t take notes or record their sessions, even lets him just sit in silence if he wants to. She makes them tea and always positions them by a window, in case he doesn’t feel up to eye contact. She shows him the exact science behind mind control and explains why the Winter Soldier’s actions were not his fault.

 

He doesn’t believe her.

 

>>

 

Shuri makes him a new prosthetic, but he can't bring himself to wear it, can't even look at the fingers without thinking of how he easily they had wrapped around T’Challa’s throat. And how familiar it had felt.

 

He only puts it on for physical therapy.

 

As the doctor has him rotate his shoulder, flex his elbow, move his fingers, Bucky wonders what else he left in the ice. Wonders if he’ll ever get it back.

 

>>

 

At first, he won’t leave the lab.

 

He has paranoia issues and identity issues and trust issues, he can’t sleep for longer than four hours unmedicated and he doesn’t like to be touched by anyone he doesn’t know.

 

He’s wary and unbalanced and can’t point to where Wakanda is on a map. The lab is the only place where he has any sort of bearing.

 

But Steve promised that this was a safe place, and trusting Steve Rogers was a hundred-year old habit he was never going to break.

 

>>

 

He doesn’t feel brave enough to go outside.  
  
The open plan of the palace makes him nervous, the courtyards always full, the markets always bustling.

“A shame,” T’Challa says. "The sunsets in Wakanda are said to be the most beautiful in the world." But he sounds sad when he says it.

 

Something in Bucky’s beaten heart raises its head.

 

“I’d like to see that.” He offers, because once upon a time, Bucky Barnes was good at taking care of people.

 

T’Challa looks so surprised it makes Bucky smile.

 

T’Challa checks his watch. “Let’s go,” he says.  

 

As they walk, the king rests his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky lets him.

 

>>

 

They’re sitting outside, the Lake Nyanza spread out before them.

 

“I don’t understand,” T’Challa says, suddenly. “How you could go back. Into the ice.”

 

Bucky smiled grimly. “It’s easy, if you don’t want to be awake."

 

T’Challa doesn’t smile back. He’s twisting his signet ring around his finger and trying to look like he’s not. Bucky realizes suddenly that he’s thinking about the mountain, about dying, about everyone he loves burying his body in the snow.

 

“It saved me,” Bucky blurts, because he wants to take that shiver out of T’Challa’s hands. “Sometimes, I think it saved me.”

 

“How do you mean?” T’Challa asks.  
  
“It kept me sane, I guess. Kept me from remembering. From really feeling anything.”

 

T’Challa considers this. “In my experience,” he says carefully. “Without enduring your wounds, you cannot heal from them.”

 

>>

 

For days after, the words haunted him.

 

_Without enduring your wounds, you cannot heal from them._

 

He tries to stop thinking about cryo and its artificial silence. He goes for more walks and watches more sunsets and starts thinking about birdsong in the morning, about music in the courtyard, about Shuri’s laugh and T’Challa’s voice, starts concentrating on the night of perfect sleep he'd had, tries to replicate it the next night, and the next. 

 

One night, then two, then three.

 

>>

 

“Please,” Bucky pants, after he’s beaten T’Challa for the third time.

 

“What?” T’Challa asks.

 

Bucky ducks his head. “Please, don’t be careful with me.”

 

T’Challa looks at him, contemplative, calculating.

 

Bucky wonders how, even with his back against the ground, T’Challa’s eyes can still pin him flat.

 

>>

 

The next time they spar, T’Challa is recognizable as the man who nearly killed him in Bucharest. He’s anything but careful, hands on Bucky’s throat, knees in Bucky’s stomach—knocks him down so hard he walks away with bruises all down his spine.

 

When they’re done, T’Challa helps him up but doesn’t apologize, and Bucky could die right then and feel, well, not happy. But human.


	2. in the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start

“In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start.”  
**W.H. Auden,** **_In Memory of W. B. Yeats_ **

 

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.”

 **Donna Tartt,** **_The Goldfinch_ ** **_  
_ **

* * *

 

Eventually, he moves into the palace.

 

It’s beautiful, bustling—people filtering in and out of the main halls, politicians and clansmen and family and the Dora Milaje. It’s hectic and kinetic and almost too much for him.

 

But Shuri shows him the flying simulator and T’Challa shows him secret hallways and Okoye shows him the armory, he likes Ramonda’s quiet gardens and T’Chaka’s beautiful library, likes seeing T’Challa in t-shirts and Shuri in pajamas and their family knitting itself back together.

 

>>

 

It makes him homesick, at times.

 

He’d spent barely twenty years inside his own head, his own life, but sometimes, he ached for it.

 

Just small memories. Afternoons worth of laughter. Friends, shoulder-to-shoulder. A mother he could barely remember. A coughing Steve curled up beside him.

Home.

 

>>

 

He starts reading history books again.

 

He had hoped to find that his country had become a better place since he’d left it, that Dr. Erskine’s dream came true, that Captain America had defeated evil and ushered in an era of peace. That he and Steve had died for something.

 

Instead, what he finds following the Captain America chapters were increasingly incoherent wars and violences, committed both by and for the American people. Revolutions obliterated, heroes assassinated, movements shattered. Greedy politicians, unrepentant governments, unspeakable crimes. Every moment of beauty answered by a surge of ugliness.

 

As he read, a great sadness welled up inside him; a great disappointment.

 

A country in pieces, just the same as he had left it.   

 

>>

 

His bleak mood persisted.

 

It all seemed so pointless, sometimes. The horrors of the world were too many. Even his thin hope that somehow everything had been worth it—that he had survived it all to be here now, to live in a kinder future—seemed foolish. This century was not so different than the last.

 

 _There’s more,_ Steve says from the computer screen, a thousand miles away. _There’s more to every country than their wars._  
  
He hadn’t touched the pile of books in days, but.  
  
Steve’s words made Bucky remember the sickly boy whose only dream was to defend his country. _Not his country,_ he corrects. _His people._

 

>>

 

He didn’t really mean to start sparring again, but Okoye caught him sulking one too many times.

 

“I won’t be good company,” he grumbles, as she steers him down the hall.

 

“Not a problem.” She replies, unphased. He thinks about refusing, but she does not strike him as a woman who could be refused.

 

>>

“Yield?” she smirks, heel pressed to his throat.

 

“Yield,” he agrees, and she helps him to his feet, her smile as sharp as her spear.

 

“You fight well,” she says, and when he scowls she shrugs. “I just fight better.”

 

When he laughs, it’s a sound he doesn’t even recognize.

 

It's not much.

 

But it’s not nothing.

 

>>

 

They spar a few times a week after that.

 

She shows him how to put his anger into his hands, and keep it from his heart.

 

>>

 

He sleeps better now, but memories still trouble his dreams.

 

He tries to find something productive to do, exercising, reading, researching.

 

But mostly, he walks the palace hallways, past the arching windows and darkened rooms.

 

It’s peaceful, and quiet, and kind of fun to startle patrols when he passes.

 

>>

 

 _Creep_ , Shuri muttered affectionately, the first time she caught him at it. But she still sits up with him sometimes, watching TV until her head drops onto his shoulder.

 

>>

 

One night, there’s a light on under T’Challa’s door.

 

He checks his watch: _1:42 AM._

 

He frowns, wondering why T’Challa is awake at this hour. Hesitantly, he raises his arm to knock.

 

“Yes?” The king calls tiredly.

 

Bucky’s heartbeat picks up, then he opens the door.

 

>>

 

He doesn’t know what to say, he hadn’t planned that far ahead.

“Uh,” Bucky says. “Can’t sleep?”

“I’m afraid not. Too much to do.” T’Challa says, stretching. “What about you?”

 

“Not used to the bed, I guess.” He shrugs. “More used to sleeping on the ground. Or in the freezer.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but T’Challa’s frown just deepens.

 

“Anything I can do?” Bucky offers awkwardly. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if T’Challa says _yes_ , he doesn’t know the first thing about international policy, unless T’Challa needs someone discreetly assassinated.

 

“No, that’s alright,” the king says. “I’ll be fine.”

 

Bucky nods, then closes the door.

 

As he walks away, Bucky thinks about all the times people had asked him that same question, and how he many times he’d given that same answer.

 

>>

 

The next time it happens, it’s an accident.

 

Bucky wants to sit in the library, he finds the presence of thousands of books soothing, and there’s only so many times he can walk past the Dora Milaje before they start rolling their eyes at him.  
  
“Sorry,” he says, finding his usual table already occupied. “I can go.”

 

“Nonsense,” T’Challa says, gesturing to the cathedral-sized space with a smile. “There’s room.”

 

>>

 

It keeps happening.

 

Insomnia draws them out, and chance brings them together.

 

Sometimes Bucky stays in his room, not in the mood for questions or conversations.

 

Other times he ventures out, hoping the king is sleepless too.

 

>>

 

“I have dreams, sometimes.” He admits one night.

 

He doesn’t know what makes him say it, only that T’Challa feels like the right person to say it to.

 

The king stays silent for a long moment.

 

“I dream of Erik, still.” T'Challa says at last. “That he is alive to see the work we’re doing. I think he would have liked it.” He twists his hands. “Or hated it. I don’t know.” There is such weariness in his voice, his face.

 

“You’re doing all this for him,” Bucky says, realizing it all at once. He’d known T’Challa had opened Wakanda _because_ of Erik, but he hadn’t thought he was doing it _for_ him too.  
  
“Yes.” T’Challa said, bowing his head. “Because none of it should have happened. I need to make things right.”

 

Bucky nods. He knows all about settling debts with ghosts.

 

>>

 

“How?” He asks, later on. “How do you make it right?” He hears the desperation in his voice, and hates himself for it.

 

“I try.” T’Challa says, his face open and honest. “It’s all anyone can do.”

 

>>

 

Just before dawn, he stands to leave. There is one more thing he has to say.

 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “About your father.”

 

“Thank you,” T'Challa says, then looks him directly in the eye. “But it was not your fault.” His voice is firm, absolute. “And you have nothing to be sorry for.”

 

Bucky doesn’t believe him.

 

But he wants to.

 

>>

 

He walks back to his room.

 

He was tired of always being unstable, always starting fires, always being forgiven. T’Challa had given him help and kindness and in return, Bucky had almost killed him.

 

It was unforgivable. But T’Challa had forgiven him anyway.

 

He wants, sometimes desperately, to be held accountable for his crimes.

 

Other times, he wants to earn the absolution he’s been given.

 

>>

 

He starts a new book, written not by a historian, but by another weary WWII veteran. Right in the middle, there is a line that stops his heart.

 

“ _The America I loved still exists_.”

 

For reasons he can’t explain, he feels burning in his eyes, holds the book tighter in his hands.

 

>>

 

“What do you know about America?”

 

Shuri had coerced him into doing sunrise yoga. He regrets it now, contorting his aching body into the lotus position.

 

“Too much,” Shuri laughs. “It’s part of the reason people do not trust me.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Some say that I flout our traditions in favor of others.” She replies, a trace of hurt in her voice.

 

“Can you teach me?”

 

She grins.

 

“I’ll make you a list.”

 

>>

So he starts a new project.

 

He goes through Shuri’s list, reads Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and Stephen King, spends a day going through Michelle Obama’s Twitter and Beyoncé’s Instagram—even reads all four _Twilight_ books but never tells a soul. Instead of reading books about America he starts reading books _from_ America, stories of pain and loss and anger and unbelievable, unimaginable love.

 

This is how he learns that sometimes it is kinder to stop dwelling on the past, that history has truth but stories have _hope_ , and that you needed both to survive.

 

>>

 

“I have a surprise for you,” Shuri says.

 

They walk through Ramonda’s gardens. Blooms are scattered like gemstones on the bushes, their petals so soft Bucky was afraid to touch them. They go to the edge of the lake.

 

“I know sometimes you can’t sleep,” she says, looping her arm through his. “I thought you might like this.”

 

It’s a stone hut, small and simple and safe. The wooden bed is built into the floor, covered in a quilt woven with red and blue yarn. There’s a chest against the wall, and shelves carved into the stone. A heavy tapestry hangs across the door, and Shuri excitedly shows him how the woven-in fibers she’d designed deflect insects and rain.

 

“If you wanted me out you could have just said so,” he said, amused.

 

She punches his arm. “Say, _thank you Shuri,_ for this lovely gift.”

 

“Thank you Shuri,” he laughs. “For this lovely gift.”

 

“Thank T’Challa too,” she says over her shoulder, walking back outside. “It was his idea.”

 

Bucky’s heart beats in his chest, warm and steady and indisputably, there.

 

>>

 

They walk back to the palace together.

 

“There’s something else too,” she says, stopping outside the front gate. For once, she seems hesitant, unsure. She presses something into his hand.

 

It’s a red star, heavy and cold against his skin.

 

“We retrieved the arm from Siberia, when you first arrived.” She explains, watching him carefully. “I saved this. I wasn’t sure if you’d want it, but I held onto it, just in case.”

 

He doesn’t know if he wants to throw the thing into the Nyanza, or turn it into a keychain.

 

He slips it into his pocket, until he figures it out.

 

>>

 

He doesn’t sleep there every night, but the hut quickly becomes one of his favorite places.

 

The mattress is firm and low to the ground, much easier on his soldier’s back than the thick mattress in his palace room. The night breeze filters pleasantly through the windows, sometimes cold enough to wake him from fevered dreams. And when he wakes, he can sit on the floor, draw back the tapestry, and watch the sky melt into the water.

 

>>

 

He learns different names for the stars.

 _Dithutlwa_ , the Giraffes. _Ndemara_ , the Sweetheart Star. _iNtshola_ , the Cattle Thief.

 

 _Khohamutsho,_ said to draw the dawn out from the night, like water through cloth. Bucky watches it happen, the starlight slowly drowning in the sun.

He watches T’Challa’s window too, watches the king’s shadow moving back and forth long after the stars disappear.  

 

>>

 

“Are you adjusting well?” Azari asks.

 

It’s been six months since he was last in cryostasis.  
  
He had learned to keep his hands quiet and his heart still. He does yoga in the morning and breathing meditation in the evening and it’s been good for him, learning peace.

 

He has his own room, his own bed. There’s a new stack of books on his shelf and a stash of knives beneath his mattress. He washes his hair, changes his clothes, brushes his teeth. He laughs with Shuri and trains with Okoye and has strange midnight talks with T’Challa.

 

They are each in their own way, secretive and dangerous. But he trusts them.

 

He doesn’t know how, but somewhere along the line his wariness had started ebbing, started fading, and he doesn’t know when he started to feel at home here, doesn’t know how to make it stop.

 

“Yes,” he says. “I think so.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries…only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”  
>  **Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country**
> 
> I researched African astronomy [here](https://assa.saao.ac.za/astronomy-in-south-africa/ethnoastronomy/) \-- please let me know if there are any errors!


	3. a self one does not want, a heart one cannot help

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hover over the Russian text for English translation -- if there are errors in the Russian, please let me know!

“A self one does not want, a heart one cannot help.”

 **Donna Tartt,** **_The Goldfinch_ **

“Love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.”

 **Benjamin Alire Sáenz** _**,** **_Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe_ ** _

* * *

  

 _“Does T’Challa ever seem—”_ Shuri pauses. It’s a sentence she’s started before, one she never finishes.

 

But Bucky knows what she means. He’s seen it too.

 

There was something unbearable about T’Challa’s unhappiness—so hardly visible, just the glint of metal in snow.

 

>>

 

It goes on.

 

The not sleeping, the not eating, the not speaking.

 

“He doesn’t talk about it,” Shuri says finally, not meeting his eye.

 

“About what?” He asks, but he knows.

 

“Baba. Erik. Any of it.”

 

“Maybe he can’t.” Bucky replies gently.

 

“But maybe he should,” she insists. “Coming back to life did not make him invincible.”

 

Bucky doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t know how to tell her that sometimes T'Challa doesn’t sleep, that sometimes T'Challa has bad dreams, that sometimes T’Challa stares at the vibranium train like he’s waiting for someone to get off it. He doesn’t tell her that guilt is a ubiquitous, iniquitous emotion, that T’Challa is probably doing the best he can.

 

>>

 

It doesn’t help that T’Challa never stops working, trying to widen the doors he’d opened last year, building up the Oakland outreach center and bargaining with the United Nations, signing international treaties and global agreements, negotiating with the other Wakandan tribes and meeting with their delegates.

 

He holds meetings and goes to conferences and addresses just about every dissenting party in Wakanda. Bucky sometimes overhears the Taifa Ngao meetings, where council members shout abuse at T’Challa and Ramonda, terrified for their futures, about border incursions and foreign invasions and usurping thieves. There’s talk about closing the borders permanently, about cloaking shields and forcefield walls and casting foreigners out.

  
T’Challa conducts himself gracefully, but leaves the meetings looking like a man who had gone through war.

 

>>

 

He takes to sitting alone in the gardens.

 

Sometimes his mother joins him, holding his hand and talking quietly. Bucky doesn’t know what she says to him, but he knows it’s better than anything he could offer. It makes him feel strangely envious.

 

He knows that seventy years ago, Bucky Barnes was a person who could give comfort and ease pain—but seventy years later, all he knows about pain is how to tend to it quietly, and keep it in the shadows.  

 

>>

 

 _Try,_ T’Challa murmurs inside his mind. _It’s all anyone can do._

 

So the next time Bucky sees him alone, he makes himself be brave.

 

“I never really thanked you,” he says. “For letting me stay. You didn’t have to.” The king looks surprised at the admission, but pleased too.

 

“No, I didn’t,” he agrees. “But it was the right thing to do.”

 

“Some would say killing me would have been the right thing to do.”

 

“Vengeance.” T'Challa sighs, rubbing at his temple. “That is not the kind of king I want to be. I want to be more.”

 

Bucky swallows, concentrating on the words he needs to say. “You already are.” He says quietly, but firmly.

 

T’Challa looks at him in surprise, smiling gratefully. “My country might disagree.”

 

“You don’t work for your country,” Bucky says. “You work for your people.”

 

>>

 

The days go by and it’s better, T’Challa looks lighter and happier and more like himself.

 

He sounds stronger in his speeches and steadier in his choices, announces his plans for opening a second outreach center and organizes exchange trips from American schools to Wakandan ones.  

 

 _We will not be a country who hides from the world,_ he says. _We will be a people who embraces it._

>>

 

And then M’Baku’s province is attacked by vibranium poachers, and everything goes wrong all over again.

 

>>

 

When Bucky comes in, T’Challa looks up from his notes.

 

He’s been working for hours. The attack had been small, and the War Dogs had quashed it immediately, but now a precedent had been set, and the threat was real.

 

There were rings under his eyes, ink stains on his fingers, and dozens of crumpled drafts on the floor. He looks upset, he looks exhausted. He smiles at Bucky anyway.

 

“Birnin Zana,” Bucky says, leaning against the doorway. “What does that translate to?”

 

“The Golden City,” the king replies. “Why?”

 

He takes a deep breath. “I was hoping you could show me.”

 

>>

 

They walk together through the capital.

 

People come up to T’Challa eagerly—he shakes their hands, hears their news, sends them off smiling. Others turn away or shake their heads, but they are few and furtive.

 

They buy long skewers of suya and T’Challa tells Bucky stories as they eat, of Bashenga, the first Black Panther, of Oronde, who outran a cheetah, of the lost mountain city of Nri, whose people grew wings like birds.  
  
Bucky mutters something about how they should buy Sam a ticket there, and T’Challa laughs out loud.

 

The sound ignites something warm within him, just a small candle burning in his heart.

As he speaks of his home, T’Challa’s face grows younger and happier, every step loosening the tension from his body and lifting the tiredness from his brow.

 

Bucky doesn’t understand why, but in the hour they spend together, he feels his own troubles leaving him too.

 

>>

 

For a few weeks in August, T’Challa leaves.

 

The Oakland center was finally functional enough to support a second location, and T’Challa had decided to place it in New York. Once built, he spent some time overseeing employee training and network management, conferring with Nakia in Oakland and Shuri in Wakanda. After ensuring the project was in good standing, he returned home.

 

When he gets back, he knocks on Bucky’s door.

 

“Now that I’ve seen one New York, I’d like to hear about yours,” he says, sitting across from Bucky, eager in a way that is endearing, and charming, and more than Bucky’s heart can stand.

 

He smiles—he can’t help it—and tells T’Challa about Brooklyn.  

>>

 

“You must miss it.” T’Challa says.

 

He covers Bucky’s hand with his.

 

Warmth slowly suffuses through him, like every cell of his skin was suddenly waking up.

 

>>

 

After that, it’s hard not to notice.

 

T'Challa.

 

The curve of his jaw. The shape of his hands.

 

It’s a feeling that shouldn't belong to him—an anomaly, one that his programmers would have beaten and electrocuted out of him.

 

He keeps it to himself.

 

>>

 

“He seems happier,” Shuri says, in between the first and second _Lord of the Rings_ movies. She had made another list of her favorite American films, and they’d been working through it over the past few weeks.

 

“Oh?” Bucky asks, voice determinedly neutral.

 

“You _both_ do,” she replies, eyeing him. He knows what she’s asking, wishes he had an answer for her. For himself.

 

>>

 

There are these moments when he travels back in time.

 

“What do you think?” T’Challa asks. He spreads his hands wide, smiling like the sunrise.

 

He was wearing new ceremonials, dark silks swirled with silver thread, embroidered and beaded and nearly as beautiful as the man wearing them.

 

“You’ll break a few hearts,” Bucky says, grinning, and T’Challa winks back, and what happens next is Bucky’s whole stomach drops because for a moment he’d fallen back into himself, into 1941, when he was twenty years old, flirting with bartenders and kissing waitresses, and it seems impossible that it was so _easy_ , once, to fall in love.  

 

>>

 

For a few nights after, he has trouble sleeping. But his dreams are different now.

 

T’Challa’s hand on his shoulder. T’Challa’s smile in the morning. T’Challa outlined by stars.

 

>>

 

It isn’t long before old memories start to poison his sleep. 

 

He dreams of Zola, Pierce — of rubber between his teeth and electricity shooting through his brain, because any time the operative displayed emotion it meant an extra round of memory-wiping, it meant his hands were bound and his brain was burned and he was taught to shut it down.

 

>>

 

So he shuts it down.

 

>>

 

He reads more books, and it doesn’t help.

 

He does more exercise, and it doesn’t help.

 

He avoids the king, and it doesn’t help.

 

T’Challa smiles. Bucky’s heart beats. The two are connected somehow.

 

>>

 

T’Challa finds him outside, the hour too late to be anything but insomnia.

 

He had hoped the smell of the garden would chase away the nightmare smell; burning rubber and blood.  
  
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Bucky says, trying to sound amused instead of exhausted.

 

T’Challa sits beside him. Elbows on his knees, face in his hands, eyes on the stars.

 

“In Wakanda, it is said that all meetings are chances, but all happenings are choices.”

 

Bucky looks at him.

 

He doesn’t know much—just that he had met T’Challa by some incalculable chance, and loved him through some unknowable choice, that the rules of the universe were written by a lunatic hand, that time was breakable, and life was fleeting, and love was a burden he did not know how to bear. 

>>

 

“I wish I could help you." T’Challa says.

 

Bucky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t say that T’Challa had helped him in more ways than can he could count, that he had come here with seventy years of lead in his bones and a storm of nightmares in his head, that Shuri had given him back his mind but T’Challa had given him back his heart, that he didn't know what to do with either one.

 

And what happens next is T’Challa moves close to his side, touches his wrist, leans in so close Bucky can feel his breath against his cheek—and he wants, so badly, to be the kind of person who could do this, the kind of person who could lean back, lean in, let another person take his weight, just for a second.

 

But he isn’t. He can’t. He goes inside.

 

>>

 

The next day, he passes T’Challa in the hallway.

 

M’Baku is at his side, speaking in rapid Xhosa.

 

T’Challa nods to him as they walk past, but avoids meeting his eye.

 

>>

 

 _Shame,_ Bucky thinks, is an emotion that he wishes he hadn’t gotten back.

 

>>

 

He moves the rest of his things into his lakeside hut.

 

Shuri grudgingly helps him, her mouth tight. She’d said a hundred things to him to change his mind. He’d mumbled something about sleeping in the open air, about getting space, about not intruding on their hospitality.

 

His excuses are weak and insulting. She makes sure he knows it.

 

>>

 

After he misses two sessions in a row, Azari comes to see him.

 

“Do you think this will help you?” She asks. She asks the question gently, but Bucky still takes it like a punch.

 

He’s doing this wrong, he knows. Just like everything else.

 

>>

 

Natasha showing up was less of a surprise and more of an eventuality.

 

He opens his eyes at the same second she moves to wake him, pulls his knife at the same time she pulls her gun. They stay like that, mirrored, until she smiles.

 

"все хорошо?"

 

"это было."  He grumbled.

 

“Oh don’t look like that,” She scolds, holstering her gun. “We’ve tried to kill each other lots of times.”

 

"I remember." He doesn’t drop the knife. "A few times anyway. Stockland in '92."

 

"Berlin in '89." She smiles, and it’s the smile he remembers seeing from the opposite side of the Berlin Wall, her lips blood red as the bricks came down.

 

“Why are you here, Natalia?” He asks, resigned.

 

“Just making sure you’re okay.”

 

"Xерня."

 

She laughs. “Well it’s more for Rogers than me. I know you can take care of yourself.”

 

“Tell Steve I’m fine.”

 

“He knows. But the thing is,” She says, sitting at the foot of his bed. “You might not be fine _here_.”

 

Bucky frowns. “Steve said this was the safest place for me.”

 

“That was before Wakanda blew the lid on their whole,” she gestures around the room. “Everything. This place used to be a secret, that’s why we hid you here. Now it might be time to reevaluate.”

 

Bucky swallowed. Months of recuperation and therapy had given him a new arm, a clear head, and now—a choice.

 

He could leave the palace. Leave Wakanda. Leave T’Challa.

 

“Tell Steve,” Bucky said, and suddenly, it was easy. “I’m fine right here."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natasha: "All is well?"  
> Bucky: "It was."  
> Bucky: "Bullshit."


	4. what heart i have is yours

“What heart I have is yours.”

 **Stephen King,** **_Wizard in Glass_ **

 

“Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.”

 **Stephen King,** **_Wolves of the Calla_ **

 

“I have a new theory,” he said, “and the theory is this: if I develop a great capacity for feeling pain, then I am also developing a great capacity for feeling happiness.”

 **Benjamin Alire Sáenz,** **_Last Night I Sang to the Monster_ **

* * *

 

They’re sitting at the edge of the Nyanza. All the water looks like glass and all his bones feel like lead.

 

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Shuri says. She’d come because of course she had, because she always did, because when he retreated into himself she could always call him back out. “Are you okay?”

 

Everything in his body, everything in his mind, everything in his _programming_ tells him to deny her entry into his thoughts, to keep her away from his weaknesses.

 

“No.” He says instead. “I’m not okay.” She doesn’t look away.

 

“I used to,” he starts, then rubs a hand across his eyes. “I used to have a lot more fight in me.”

 

She takes his hand. “That is not such a bad thing,” she says quietly.

 

He closes his eyes, shudders. “I’m tired,” he says, the admission breaking his voice, his heart, his pride.

 

“I know,” she says, and leans their shoulders together as they look out across the water.

 

>>

 

It was so very beautiful here. So peaceful. And the words had been so very heavy inside him.

 

Speaking them aloud left his whole body feeling lighter—there was suddenly so much space in his lungs, his stomach.

 

Bucky breathed.

 

>>

 

He wanted to be grateful for life. He wanted to be the bright-eyed boy in the photographs who had laughed and lived and loved. He wanted to deserve it.

 

>>

 

The sun was just setting when Bucky got back to the palace.

 

T’Challa was alone in the garden, just like Bucky knew he would be.

 

When he sees Bucky, he looks down, pulls his arms a little closer to his body, like he’s embarrassed, like he’s _ashamed,_ so Bucky drops down beside him, takes the king’s face in his hands, and kisses him.

 

>>

 

When he pulls back, the light streams between their faces, burnishing their skin in gold.

 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says. “That it took me so long.”

 

T’Challa shakes his head incredulously. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” He says.

 

And this time—Bucky believes him.

 

>>

 

At first, Bucky worried that everything would change.

 

It’s been eighty years since he knew his way around something even resembling a relationship, and nothing in the life of Bucky Barnes or the Winter Soldier had prepared him for _courting royalty._

 

But all that really changes is that Okoye snickers when he slips into T’Challa’s room at night.

 

>>

 

It’s better now, but neither of them have finished healing.

 

Sometimes Bucky still sleeps outside and sometimes T’Challa doesn’t sleep at all.

 

“I killed him,” he says one night, when Erik’s ghost is loud in his head.

 

Bucky sits up, draws T’Challa back against his chest.

 

“A lot of things killed him.” He says, because regret was poured from a bottomless glass, and you could die from drinking.

>>

 

For all that they live in the same place, they don’t always see much of each other.  

 

T’Challa has a kingdom to run, often visiting different provinces or jetting off to other countries.

 

Half-amused, half-aggrieved, Bucky realizes that without all-consuming neuroses to take up his day, he’s bored. So next time he sees Ramonda in the gardens, he asks what he can do to help.  

 

He works outside most of the day, planting trees and digging holes and building fences. He loves the work, loves doing something with his hands that he can be proud of.

 

And when the king gets home he strolls outside, leans against the garden wall Bucky had just finished building, and lets him kiss him with earth-smudged lips.

 

>>

 

“How are you doing today?”

 

Sam’s voice crackles through the phone.

 

“Didn’t kill anyone,” Bucky says wryly, smiling as Sam laughs like a lunatic.

 

“Good,” he snorts. “But I have a couple of names for you if you get bored, Corey Johnson, he stole my girlfriend in fifth grade—”

 

“Very funny, birdbrain,” Bucky says, but he’s _smiling_ , he’s _happy_ , he knows it, and Sam knows it, and this, he thinks, is what people do.

 

>>

 

One morning, Bucky wakes to see T’Challa dressing in his ceremonial tunic.

 

“Going somewhere?” he asks, pulling the tangled blankets closer.

T’Challa finishes buttoning his collar into place. “There is a panel in Washington D.C I must attend.” He turns to Bucky, eyes sparkling in a way that Bucky associates with trouble. “Would you like to come?”

 

>>

 

Shuri makes him a fake passport and ID in exchange for souvenirs from every gift shop.

 

“Don’t get in trouble.” She warns.

 

“You know me,” he says, grinning. “No trouble here.”

 

>>

 

Bucky doesn't go to the meeting with T’Challa.  

 

Instead, pulls on a Brooklyn Dodgers hat (present from Steve) and a soft red flannel (stolen from Shuri), and walks around the National Mall. He smiles, thinking of Steve and Sam running each other in circles down every walkway. 

 

He walks to the World War II memorial, abuzz with tourists, the giant fountain catching the sunlight and throwing it back into the sky. 

 

A tiny old woman asks him to take her picture in front of the New York pillar, and he does, his hands shaking a little. “I was a nurse back in ‘41,” she tells him, tucking the camera into her purse. “Even met Captain America once” she adds, proudly.

 

>>

 

He crosses the Potomac, walking until he reaches the place he wanted to see. 

 

The gate of Arlington Cemetery is tall and stately, a somber guardian around the grassy fields. 

 

When Bucky passes through it he shivers, a chill buried somewhere deep inside him, spreading throughout his whole body. 

 

>>

 

Among thousands of marble stones, he finds his grave. 

 

>>   
  


The Commandos have their own small memorial among the World War II veterans. The graves of Jim Morita, Gabe Jones, and Dum Dum Dugan are beside his. Bucky guesses that Monty and Dernier are buried in their home countries. 

 

Instead of a grave, Steve’s name is carved into a granite replica of his original shield. There’s a mountain of flowers underneath it, as well as notes, pictures, drawings, candles.

Bucky knows that there are dozens of shrines just like in this cemetery, in  _ every _ cemetery. For a moment he wonders about the alchemy of the human heart, how it can turn even the deepest sadness into love.    
  


From his pocket, he takes out the red star Shuri had returned to him months ago. He kneels down, and presses it into the earth in front of his grave.

 

He touches the stone only once, pressing his palm briefly to his name. 

 

>>

 

He walks back across the bridge, hands in his pockets. 

 

There will come a day, he knows, when he will be called to arms again. When he will be asked to risk his life for the lives of others, sacrifice his peace for the peace of the world. He finds, strangely, that he resents this. 

 

He can’t remember feeling like this before—like he was protective of his life. Like it was something worth being protective of. 

 

>>

  
When he gets back to the hotel, T’Challa is waiting for him. 

 

“Are you alright?” the king murmurs, touching the side of his face lightly.

 

“Yes,” Bucky says, and it’s true, he thinks. At last. 

 

>>

 

The next day, they pack their bags and get ready to leave. 

 

“There’s one more thing we need to do,” Bucky reminds him. 

 

“Oh?” 

 

“We still owe Shuri.” 

 

>>

 

They start with the Air and Space museum. 

 

T’Challa points at all the different planes in amazement; it had been centuries since anything as unsophisticated as a 747 had been seen in Wakanda, and T’Challa was fascinated by America’s slow aeronautic evolution. While T’Challa examined the  _ Spirit of St. Louis _ , Bucky walked sheepishly over to the Apollo 11 command module, which he had once been assigned to destroy. He gets Shuri an  _ Enterprise  _ keychain and a NASA T-shirt. 

  
In the Museum of Natural History, they see so many wonders that Bucky’s heart feels like it will overflow—butterflies the color of gemstones, bones as thin as paper, fossils as old as time. 

 

Bucky know that somewhere in this museum, there is a room dedicated to Steve Rogers and the Howling Commandos. Plaques bearing his name over boiled-down descriptions of his life. Footage of doomed men, trapped in endless loops. But T’Challa doesn’t ask to go in, and Bucky doesn’t offer. 

 

Instead, T’Challa twines their fingers together, picks out a dinosaur figurine for Shuri, and kisses Bucky outside the giftshop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart.”  
>  **Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More**


End file.
